The world sets us up for failure. Open any page of Elle or Vogue or Vanity Fair and you’ll see what I’m talking about. We can’t win. What is the percentage of the world that can afford the things these magazines advertise? And what about the models? Yes, there is a lot photoshopping going on but still? And what about the homes? The glamour? The political power?

Life to most of us becomes a constant fight not to succumb to the despair caused by what is thrown on our faces on a daily basis and which we don’t have and probably never will.

My fourteen year old niece asked me a couple of days ago what life was about? She asked: “Tia (aunt in Portuguese), what are we supposed to do in life?” There is no simple answer, I had to confess to her. It’s complicated.”

Why is that the magazines don’t advertise things that most mortals can actually afford? Why is that the people selling this stuff to us don’t look like most of us? Why do both the women and the men all look like teasers? Look at me but don’t touch and hear me loud and clear “you’ll never have me.”

I want to go to Tahiti and stay at the Four Seasons Hotel and eat pineapple on the beach and then get a massage on the sand. I want to buy the D&G bag I see in their ad. I would look amazing with the new leather jacket from Jean Paul Gaultier.

No wonder so many of us walk around frustrate, we just can’t compete. We just don’t have a chance. Maybe our society is set up as a political and social subversive machine. I go back to, how many of us can live the lives described in the magazines, ads, films and television programming? 5%? 1%? That’s a minimal amount of people on top of the world. What if kindness, service, actual happiness became the “it” thing?

I don’t know but the way the world is set up right now most of us are enslaved to the want and need machine and to most of us that will be a life time journey without ever achieving the goal.

I think the solution is to change our focus and stand steady on what really matters in life.